Revolutionizing IV Safety: Newport News company changing patient outcomes with technology to detect leaking IVs
The Speaker:
Gary Warren is president and CEO of ivWatch, which develops and manufactures non-invasive biosensors that fulfill a huge and often overlooked patient safety need in healthcare. He started ivWatch in 2010.
Warren has a multidisciplinary background with a 14-year career as a research scientist at NASA in aerospace and computational fluid dynamics. He left NASA to start a successful internet infrastructure company in the mid-1990’s and served as CEO until its sale to Symantec in 1999. At Symantec, Warren served as a senior vice president and oversaw advanced technologies, mergers and acquisitions and gateway software products.
After Symantec, he served as CEO for a venture-backed mobile platform company as smartphones were beginning to emerge as a market.
After the sale of this company to Oracle, he worked for various venture capital companies doing financial analysis and due diligence which brought him to the work being done on IV infiltrations under a National Institutes of Health grant.
Tune in on Wednesday January 3, 2024 at noon to learn about the Newport News-based medtech company that has developed game-changing technology to monitor and detect when an IV is leaking. ivWatch is addressing the silent epidemic of IV injury head-on with its proprietary sensors, developed and made in Virginia.
Having an accidental leak from an IV can cause serious harm to a patient, resulting in nerve damage, scarring, permanent staining of the skin, and even death in some cases.
But Newport New-based ivWatch, which develops and manufactures non-invasive biosensors that fulfill a huge and often overlooked patient safety need in healthcare, has more than 70 patents addressing this problem. The company has developed sensor and patient monitors that identifies when an intravenous line is leaking and alerts nurses and doctors that a problem is occurring - often before they can spot it with their own eyes.
The non-invasive technology continuously monitors a patient’s IV status using advanced optics to notify in real-time of any tissue changes that indicate a potential IV leaking.
If IV drugs are infiltrating into the surrounding tissue and not into the vein, that means the patient isn’t getting the full amount of medicine needed. The leaking can cause chemical burns in the case of chemotherapy, and permanent skin staining with iron infusions.
Serial entrepreneur Gary Warren has an eye for a good idea. The former NASA engineer learned of game-changing technology that could monitor and detect IV infiltrations. The only problem at the time? The technology didn’t work. After acquiring the company that owned the technology in 2010, Warren assembled a a team of leading scientists, clinicians, hospitals, and investors to solve the problem. The team set up a command center in his basement, racking up hours and filling up chalk boards determining how to make it work.
After five years of steadfast trial and error, the team not only had a working prototype, but a vision for a family of smart sensors and patient monitors that would prove to transform patient care and safety, not just here in the U.S., but around the globe.
Under his leadership, ivWatch has amassed more than 71 patents worldwide and more than 30 clinical studies. He also has guided ivWatch through multiple clearances from the FDA and approvals for the European Union’s CE mark designation for this breakthrough technology. ivWatch products now are sold on the international market.